The Real Story of the Biggest Quiz Show Scandal of the ’50s: How it Changed Game Shows

On the Radio

Details David, “The first game shows aired on radio in the 1940s, simple question-and-answer contests with prize money that rarely topped a hundred bucks. But when television adopted the format, producers discovered that higher prizes attracted more viewers. In 1955, The $64,000 Question ranked among the highest-rated shows in the medium’s young history. A host of quiz shows were launched hoping to attract the same following, and that’s where the trouble began.”

‘Twenty-One’

Twenty-One debuted on NBC in 1956, produced by Jack Barry (who also served as host) and Dan Enright. In it, a pair of contestants compete against each other in separate isolation booths, answering questions of basic knowledge in the hopes of earning a total of 21 points. “The first episode was a disaster,” Adam proclaims, “because they actually did play legitimate and had two contestants who missed 17 straight questions. It looked really, really bad. The audience was laughing at it and it’s really kind of funny watching Jack Barry in that premiere episode, because he’s trying to chuckle along with the audience, but you can tell he is seething. And so was the sponsor, Geritol.”

Sponsors

“Sponsors,” he elaborates, “wielded a lot of control over TV shows and Geritol was all over them with more of an iron fist than the network had been. They stepped in and said, ‘Listen, we’re never going to have another show like that again. You’ve got to do something about it.’ And that was when Jack Barry and Dan Enright made the decision to start rigging it. But you have to understand the way things worked at that point. It wasn’t necessarily that every quiz shows was rigged at the time; it’s kind of hard to zero in on exactly when rigging started, depending on your definition of rigging. For example, in the 1940s there was a show on the radio called Quiz Kids, where they had a panel of child geniuses.”

The Premise

The premise of the show was listeners could mail any questions they wanted, and if your question stumped one of the Quiz Kids, you’d win a prize. “The trick of the show,” Adam reveals, “was the people that were operating it kind of had a handle on what these kids knew and what they didn’t know. And they would weed out questions if they felt the kids didn’t have a good chance of knowing it. So they were screening that mail very carefully. I don’t know if that qualifies as rigging, but that’s kind of an example of how there was always some sort of level of control on game shows. And then The $64,000 Question exploded, and that was kind of the point where all bets were off. Suddenly the TV landscape was littered with game shows, and some — not all — were fixed.”

Herbert Milton Stempel

Enter Herbert Milton Stempel, a fan of quiz shows and a man equipped with what he described as a “retentive memory,” who found himself a contestant on Twenty-One. “Once Jack Barry and Dan Enright started rigging the show,” says Adam, “their first big winner was Herb Stempel. He was a real person, but he was given a character to play. Dan Enright, by a lot of accounts, was a master choreographer. He had a very specific way he wanted his shows to look and a very specific way he wanted all of his hosts to present themselves. So he would not just fix the show, he would go about creating a character for some of the contestants. Stempel was told to get a short haircut and he was given a wardrobe of suits that didn’t fit him quite right; they were all just slightly big on him. He was also told to address the host, Jack Barry, not as Jack, but as ‘Mr. Barry.’”

He Kept Winning

He continues, “Enright wanted to set him off as kind of an awkward nerd, have him win a run of games and sort of make him an unlikable figure to get to the point where the audience would be sick of seeing him and want to see him get knocked off. So Herb Stempel had this very manufactured identity set up for him when Charles Van Doren came along and defeated him. That was kind of the big thing you would see: Van Doran was set up as the giant killer over this nerd and kept winning and winning.”

A Huge Contrast

Whereas Herb Stempel was raised in one of the poorest parts of the Bronx during the Great Depression — though he was so intelligent he skipped a few grades and ended up, after graduating high school, enlisting in the U.S. Army  — Charles Van Doren was born to a father who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, critic and teacher; a mother who was a novelist and writer and an uncle who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer. He himself graduated from the High School of Music & Art in New York, and went on to earn a B.A. degree in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland as well as an M.A. in astrophysics and a Ph.D. in English, and was a teacher. It was an almost startling contrast between the two men.

A ‘Safe Elvis’

Notes Adam, “I wish I could remember who I’m quoting here, but the term I’ve heard to describe Van Doren is that he was a ‘safe Elvis.’ In the ’50s there was the emergence of rock and roll and suddenly parents were very scared of the role models their kids were going to have. Then Charles Van Doren comes on the show. He’s handsome, engaged, very likable and very, very smart. And he can stand on stage and say that he’s this professor at Columbia University. That’s the kind of guy that you want your kids to look up to. On top of that, to have this guy on stage who is a college professor, but he’s not a dullard, not a stern authority figure and he’s not strict. He’s a very likable, very witty, very outgoing, very charming person. He’s so antithetical to what kids view as a nerd.”

His Legacy

It’s his belief that in a legitimate quiz, Charles Van Doren could have been very competitive or a champion, but, instead, his legacy is being a champion on a rigged quiz show. As was Herb Stempel’s, who, says Adam, had always claimed he was throwing the game on the promise there would be a spot for him on another show that Enright was developing. “It was called High-Low [also hosted by Jack Barry] and was going to have a summer 1957 run on NBC. He was promised he would be part of the panel of that show if he played along with this. First of all, that didn’t happen. Barry and Enright did do High-Low, but Herb Stempel never appeared on it. The other thing they did to him was ask him to lose the game on what at that time was an easy question: the 1956 Academy Award winner for Best Picture.” Which, for the record, was Ernest Borgnine’s Marty.

Outrage

Stempel, he continues, was outraged by this, “Not only because it was such an easy question, but also from a personal standpoint. He had loved that movie and even said he’d gone to the theater to see it three or four times, so he was offended. Enright — again, the master choreographer — wanted every game to have a story and he saw this as the tragic downfall of a know-it-all. That there was this one simple thing that this super-genius didn’t know. So they asked him to lose and Stempel admitted later that he seriously thought about double-crossing them and giving the correct answer to that question. He lost his nerve for the same thing that a lot of contestants felt: the atmosphere of a big-time TV show was so intimidating that none of them wanted to risk going off-script. They all wanted to behave themselves, because they found the aura so overwhelming once they were actually in the studio.”

The End of the Reign

Detailing the end of Stempel’s reign, David Hofstede says, “In Twenty-One, the money at stake doubled every time there was a tie, and when Stempel and Van Doren squared off for the last time, the stakes had risen from $500 a point to $2,500 a point. Van Doren had the victory and $129,000 in winnings. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine and parlayed his fame into a correspondent’s position on NBC’s Today show. Similar offers to the less photogenic Stempel were not forthcoming, and after unsuccessful attempts to further cash in on his fading celebrity, he was willing to go public.”

Blowing the Whistle

The producers, according to Adam, probably felt that Stempel would fade into the background, but that didn’t happen — not helped by the fact that the former contestant felt he was being taunted. “When Charles Van Doren made the cover of TV Guide,” he says, “in an adjoining article Jack Barry said, ‘This is the kind of contestant that we really want, because he’s not a freak with a sponge memory.’ Jack didn’t name a name, but Herb Stempel read that article and was convinced that that was a shot at him. He took that quote in TV Guide very personally. The next thing that happened was that, and the movie, again, touches on this, he got swindled out of his winnings by some really shady investment deals. So he began trying to get the attention of the press to let them know what was going on. Absolutely nobody in the press cared. He tried blackmailing Dan Enright at one point, but Enright recorded him demanding $50,000 or else he was going to blow the whistle to the press.”

A Shocking Confession

“What ended up happening was that Enright got him to admit on the audio recording what he was doing, which constituted blackmail,” continues Adam. “Because of that, he got him to sign a legal document saying that Twenty-One was completely truthful and that he had no claim to any money or the right to say anything was shady about the show.”

It Wasn’t the End

By all rights, that should have been the end of the story. It wasn’t. Details David, “In August 1958, a former contestant on the game show Dotto walked into the Complaint Bureau of the New York District Attorney’s office, claiming that the game was fixed. The contestant, Edward Hilgememeier, produced a notebook page from a contestant who won on the show, which listed answers to questions before they had been asked. The investigation widened after prosecutor Joseph Stone was contacted by Herbert Stempel, who claimed he only lost to Van Doren because he was ordered to do so. A New York grand jury investigation unearthed details of how the contestants were coached before their appearances, and how they were taught to act as if they were struggling to find the answers that had already been provided.”

The Hearing

Adam further elaborates, explaining, “When Stempel came in for his hearing, they showed kinescopes of his appearances on Twenty-One, and he was going through them point by point, showing off the acting lessons that he got from Dan Enright. He said, ‘Now at this point, I’m going to bite my bottom lip. Dan Enright wanted to make sure I did that, because there was an extreme close-up and that was very expressive. You’ll notice here I’m patting my brow to get rid of the sweat. I was told very specifically to pat my eyebrow, don’t wipe my forehead.’ So Herb Stempel was given acting lessons. They even brought in Patty Duke, who was still a kid but who had appeared on The $64,000 Challenge, which was the spin-off of The $64,000 Question. She gave testimony that the game wasn’t rigged and nothing bad happened. As she started to leave the stand, a very nice older congressman just kind of leans into his microphone and says, ‘Now, Patty, before you leave, let me ask: Was everything that you’ve just told us the truth?’ And Patty Duke burst into tears and confessed everything; that she was coached and all of that.”

The Evidence

And the evidence continued to mount from there. “James Snodgrass was a contestant on Twenty-One for several weeks of tie games,” Adam states. “Each week after he was given a coaching session where he was told in advance what the questions were going to be and what answers he was to give, Snodgrass started thinking, ‘Boy, this sure sounds illegal.’ Everyone was telling him, ‘No, no, no, there’s no law against what we’re doing.’ But Snodgrass just felt like he should probably do something to cover himself. He would go home and write a letter to himself, described what he had done at the Barry/Enright offices that day and described the briefing that he got and the instruction that he was given and the questions and answers that were provided in advance.”

Predicting the Future

“Then he would mail the letters to himself and would send that via registered mail. So they had the rubber stamps all over the seal on the envelope and then he didn’t open them. He just held on to them until the DA knocked on the door and said, ‘Listen, we know you’re a contestant on Twenty-One. Do you have any information?’ And he just handed over all the letters he’d written to himself. They opened all these sealed envelops and found out that they matched perfectly. For his testimony for Congress, they left one letter sealed and as Snodgrass sat there, they opened the letter and read what had been sitting sealed for two years. They covered the scope of the game, describing things very accurately and predicting the future.”

Charles Van Doren

Initially, Charles Van Doren was more or less being exonerated from his involvement, the D.A. in New York believing that he had gotten some really bad legal advice from somebody at NBC — this despite the point Herb Stempel kept making that it was impossible for him to have been in on what was going on without Van Doren being as equally involved. “Then,” offers Adam incredulously, “Van Doren sends out a telegram volunteering to testify before Congress if Congress feels he has anything to offer.”

An Internal Conflict

“He was basically daring somebody to call his bluff,” he adds with a laugh. “So Congress sees the telegram, they’re like, ‘You know what? Let’s go ahead and call him in for questioning.’ He basically painted himself into a corner and ended up giving a statement where he confessed everything. One of the things I’ll say to the credit of the movie Quiz Show is they didn’t paint Van Doren as the bad guy. It would’ve been very easy to do a movie where Herb Stempel is the wronged hero and Charles Van Doren is the upper crust villain who’s trying to stomp on a little guy. They didn’t do that. They do a great job of showing the dilemma and moral issues that Charles Van Doren is having with what he’s been a part of. It really was an internal conflict for him. In any case, he gave this statement to Congress and that was really the end of that era.”

Consequences

Says David, “As a result of the quiz show scandals, Congress made rigging a television game show a federal crime. Networks abandoned the practice of single sponsorship of its shows, which gave those sponsors undue influence on the content of programming. All these years later, the lessons learned are still put into practice on today’s game shows.”

TV quiz and game shows changed, and eventually everyone moved on. But what of the key players of Charles Van Doren and Herb Stempel? “I feel that Van Doren was very content with his fate,” Adam muses. “He wrote a piece for the The New Yorker in which he talked about how the only thing that really bothered him about the movie was at the end where it says on screen that Charles Van Doren never taught again, and that wasn’t true. His career was interrupted, but he did end up becoming a teacher. He wrote several books, settled down with his wife, started a family, had children, had grandchildren, It appears that he ended up having a quiet, normal life. After the dust settled from the scandal, he was able to make something of himself.”

‘Very Wounded’

Insofar as Herb Stempel is concerned, Adam believes that to this day he remains “very wounded,” and still looking for vindication. “Some years back,” he relates, “he revealed that he wanted to be a contestant on Jeopardy, but they told hi that he would have to audition the same as everyone else. He elected not to do it, because he felt that as a result of what had happened to him, he basically felt that he deserved a free pass. I think that kind of shows his thinking, that he feels he hasn’t gotten whatever he feels he’s entitled to.”

The Impact

Another point he raises is the question of what does someone like Herb Stempel even do as a follow-up to an experience like the one he had. “I’m speculating here; can’t emphasize that enough,” closes Adam. “But you bring down a major TV Show, you alter the way that TV networks conduct their business with producers. You alter the way that producers deal with sponsors. You bring about major changes in the way shows are conducted as a result of your testimony to Congress. That’s great. But what do you really do after that? What from that can you put on a resume and what job can you get hired for with that experience? I mean, it’s a big thing, but it’s not a big thing that translates to anything. You can’t take away from that kind of accomplishment to bring that kind of major change to television, but it’s not a transferable achievement. It’s nothing that you’ve can turn into anything.”